Reading Victorian Sculpture

This introduction reflects on reading sculpture in Victorian culture, and in Victorian studies. How did the Victorians read sculpture? How should we read it today? What might a sculpture connote in different contexts: the home, the street, the gallery, the colony? How broadly should we define what we describe as ‘Victorian sculpture’, in light of nineteenth-century industrial and technological innovation? For the Victorians, as for modern readers of Victorian sculpture, legibility remains a prime preoccupation when addressing these questions. This introduction suggests that Victorian sculpture’s resistance to reading renders it fertile ground for revisiting and reinterpreting individual works, their creators, textual responses to them, and the greater significance of their cumulative cultural imprint.